Jubilee Transformation and the Call to Reconciliation

The jubilee tradition has many connecting themes. One powerful current that runs through all the themes is the transformative power of God at work, reshaping our hearts and restoring our world. The hopes of the jubilee tradition are also a plea to transform our consciousness and envision how ordinary women and men, you and I, can participate in God's enveloping mercy and creative acts of forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration and a plea to pause and recognize the fractured, dislocated points in our worlds of relationships. This is what the spirituality of jubilee calls us to: connectedness and transformation. Is this not what we long for, hope for, dream about . . . a re-imaging of God's reign on this earth that is ours?

We may well ask where and how does God's transformative power take place in our hearts? How does God inform jubilee spirituality? Both the Old and New Testaments point to the desert or the wilderness as the place where God lures, invites, draws all people, even God's own Son, there to speak to their hearts. To our hearts.

God lures us into the desert, there to change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, to give us hearts that are for conversion, hearts that are willing to be seared and made tender. Again and again, God invites us into the desert to reclaim our hearts, only to give them to the world. There is no escaping the fact that when we give our hearts to the world, our hearts will be broken. But they are broken open to become channels for a love greater than our own.

Interconnections easily broken

Foundational to the spirituality of reconciliation is the firm conviction that all of creation is interconnected. A reconciling community knows its dependence on God and interdependence on one another in a community of shared need, shared human dignity, and shared hope.

Theologian Kosuke Koyama says, "All is webbed. There is not isolated culture, language or religion. Webbedness is the form of ecology, morality, and theology. To the question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' I must answer affirmatively. There is no 'I' apart from my brother and sister."¹

A spirituality of reconciliation calls us to hold the truth and reality of our webbed relationships. But the fact is, our webbedness is extremely fragile, prone to be broken.

We must begin with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection simply is, and we are all in this together. And the remarkable thing is that God is there with us. Parker Palmer describes this reality when he says, "It is a common and curious experience how often it happens that when we present ourselves to the world as smooth and seamless, we close off all the entrances into our lives; there is no way into life together. Those parts of ourselves, the angelic parts . . . give us pride, because they make us different, not because they unite us with the common lot of humankind. Our success and glories are not the stuff of community; our sins and our failures are. In those difficult areas of our lives we confront the human condition, and we begin to learn compassion for all beings who share the limits of life itself."²

This spirituality stands as a challenge to the very different, generally perfectionistic, expressions of spirituality that have been our main response and posture to life. Rather than being a journey of perfection, it is a journey of "compassion born in the soil of vulnerability," which leads ultimately to trust, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Telling the story

Today as we discover more and more the realities of our psyche and human relationships, feelings of dislocation, isolation, betrayal, meaningless, anger, and distress persist. What can we do with the resulting confusion, rage, misunderstanding, alienation and separation? Quoting Vaclev Havel, Parker Palmer offers this response: ". . . the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility."³

I strongly agree with him. The human heart, however, is not a computer. We cannot program it with appropriate facts in the hope that it will select a healing course of actions. Everything associated with the heart can only be grasped and appreciated with the tools of religion and poetry, namely faith and imagination.

The Jews have always had a wonderful sense that remembering and feeling are two important ways of the heart and that only the magic of a story can capture the real adventure of our unique journey in life. For them, remembering is about salvation, healing of memories, and being made whole.

Sharing the story is an important step towards reconciliation when we tell our truths beyond pretension and it becomes confession about a remembering God who holds our story ever before him and who is himself intimately drawn into our story. Telling a story, however, is not always healing. Sometimes our story stays frozen, never really told, or told like a broken record stuck in one groove, over and over again without any movement.

But there is another approach. We move beyond the mere facts, into our experience, "breaking it open," as it were, to give voice to our feelings, senses, and images. Then our story can take on a whole different color and texture. The story itself begins to change.

An example may be helpful here.

I remember a very unsettling situation in a class in which a young woman insisted on putting everything under the rubric of "male domination." Conversations, discussion questions would go nowhere because of this strident voice. I had two alternatives: stay in the fray like Jacob and "wrestle with the power in the night until the breaking of day," or take flight. As a child, I learned to deny my demons in the dark, repress my feelings, hold in my tears, muffle my passion and cover my anger. Now, through the power of God at work in me, I chose to stay in the fray. I wrestled with anger and learned that the way to drain it of destructivity was to wrestle it to a blessing, to refuse to let it go until it yielded me its creative energy.

Several things happened as I wrestled with my anger in prayer--my very mode of praying changed. I had a sensation of being truly embodied by anger and God was relating to this embodiment. God was truly present to me in the here and now of my vulnerability, showing me with such gentleness that I was angry because I was experiencing what it felt like to be oppressed by another person. Gently God invited me to stay with that anger, to embrace it. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the contour of anger changed. Only then did God invite me to let go of it. With that realization came compassion, a felt understanding of the young woman which empowered me to speak my truth to her without attacking her. From that place of understanding I was able to talk to her, woman to woman, heart to heart, about what I was experiencing. Strangely enough, she could hear what I was saying without becoming defensive and was freed to make choices that restored right relationship within the group.

From this experience, I learned the importance of embracing one's experience--reflecting, pondering, praying with it and learning to trust and claim it because of the energy, authority, vitality that reside there. I learned there is a time for seeking sanctuary and safety and in that place the feminine spirit of God waits us. There is a time for licking wounds, restoring the soul, waiting for the strength to be renewed and then making choices to act, choices that are for life. I learned that if we have courage to embrace our experience as well as the immense energy that comes from naming and claiming it, we can be healed, become free in ourselves and in turn liberate others from their unfreedom.

To feel and to imagine don't seem like much, but what a power they have for connection and transformation! Feelings and imagination have a powerful way of engaging our vitalities and the vitalities of others and making space for a commingling of stories. This is the difference between a story that increases feelings of alienation and frustration and a story that generates intimacy and reconciliation with oneself and with others. This is the difference between prayer that is static and worn and prayer that changes us.

Listening with the heart
Much as stories need to be told, they also need to be received. When we share our story with another (an Other) who is willing to be engaged, something within us does begin to shift. What seemed like death and hopelessness can now begin to have seeds of hope. Its not that the painful reality is taken away, but something else happens to us and for us. We begin to see a larger picture in which there is a place for us.

I'm drawn to the way that Jesus listened to the woman who is condemned as an adulteress. (Not fond of the appellation given in Scripture, I have named her Sarah.) Jesus didn't say anything to Sarah until the end. With imagination and care he listened to all the parties involved: to the Pharisees, to their words and to their anger with him. But he also listened to the silence of the woman: her guilt, her fears, her fright, her need to be accepted for what she was without being judged and condemned. Beyond and above all that is going on, Jesus hears everyone's need for forgiveness--"Who will cast the first stone?" Jesus heard the wound . . . he heard the wound beyond the words, the fears beyond the aggressiveness, the insecurity beyond the condemnation and the rigidity. He heard the heart beyond the cynicism. He heard their story without judging, evaluating or trivializing it. His attentive listening created a safe space in which each party could transcend dark suspicions and the ambiance of attack and defense to activate their inner power for honest, growth, freedom and wholeness.

In doing this, Jesus not only gave them the greatest act of trust that anyone could give to another, he also gave them back to themselves. He restored their original identity and vocation to be self-reflective, acknowledge failing, withhold blame, claim responsibility for their action and move on from there. One by one, the scribes and Pharisees went away liberated from self-righteousness and in possession of a deeper truth about themselves. For Sarah, there was healing. Nothing so alienates us from ourselves as the censure and condemnation of others.

To reveal to others, no matter how wounded, how limited, how fragile they are, that they are acceptable and more than any one piece of their historicity, that they are loved, especially by God, that they are free, responsible co-creators in this world is truly to restore/reconcile a person to themselves and to the world around them.

Current literature tells us so much about the untold stress and signs of depression and loneliness in and around us. What we call stress might really be spiritual isolation which we have not recognized as such. I suspect that much of our modern day illness has its roots in unrecognized spiritual distress around issues of isolation, anger, rage, and the feelings people have that they don't matter because nobody hears them. To listen then, without feeling responsible for curing the wound or taking the pain away, but restoring a graciousness of soul can be a marvelous way of bringing about reconciliation.

Dwelling in the Gap

One of the things we learn when we listen to stories is that there is always a gap between intention and result, and in the gaps are often to be found the central issues of faith that are at stake: for example, doubt and belief, betrayal and promise, powerlessness and power, exclusion and belonging, suffering and hope.

I would liketo think that a reconciling community is one that is familiar with gap-dwelling--standing, waiting, and enduring the ambiguities and uncertainties of events, relationships, experiences--with the faith that God waits there to restore all things.

This is not a posture that comes easily to any of us. We are more adept at making pronouncements and prohibitions that say this is the right way and that is the wrong way. These rules and regulations give us a false sense of security and having the truth in our grasp.

There is something redemptively significant about "going up into the gaps of our lives." It extends a terrifying and yet wondrous invitation to enter more fully and totally into the paschal mystery, into the salvific power of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

This spirituality of reconciliation has three components 1) telling our stories as confession of our deepest truths and a remembering God who knows and loves our stories, 2) listening that is restorative and enabling, and 3) the contemplative attitude of going up into the gaps, into the painful contradictions of our own stories and the stories of other people and keeping vigil before the utter mystery of life itself in order to hear the heartbeat of God who initiates and brings about reconciliation.

As we move towards the millennium, we who care about damaged lives must band together for the restoration of soul. The work of reconciliation that Jesus has entrusted to us must birth hope and heal memories. It must issue forth from our felt knowledge of Jesus' reconciling power and activities in our own lives and in our communities.

The dynamic transformative quality of Jesus' reconciliation causes things to change, and it expects that things must need change if there is to be abundant life. Not adaptations, not changes, but Change. Change is of the heart. There remains for each of us and for all of us together to call to a profound unmasking of intransigent attitude and an unlearning of structures within ourselves that protect us from conversion and turning to God, Source of all reconciliation, who will "bring everything together under Christ, everything in the heavens and everything on earth."

Excerpted from "A Reflection: The Spirituality of a Reconciling Community" by Sister Marie Chin, RSM, taken from Book of Readings on Reconciliation. Copyright © 1999, United States Catholic Conference, Inc., Washington, D.C. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Endnotes

1. Kosuke Koyama, Keynote address to the International Association of Missions Studies, Hawaii, August 1992.

2. Parker Palmer, lecture at the Annual Celebration of the Indiana Office for Campus Ministries, March 1990.

3. Ibid.